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ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "Key, then, to the Drumbeat project is openness, specifically openness as applied to the Internet. That fits in well with the original impulses behind Mozilla and Firefox. The former was about transforming the Netscape Communicator code into an open source browser, and the latter was about defending open standards from Microsoft's attempt to lock people into Internet Explorer 6 and its proprietary approaches. Both Mozilla and Firefox have succeeded, but the threats have now changed."

In return, Firefox is the most unstable program in common use. Every new version includes "stability improvements", but the instability has gotten considerably worse since version 3.5.2. Firefox is so unstable it regularly crashes Windows XP, although not Linux, apparently.

I have the exact opposite experience in my personal use...Firefox more or less never crashes on my XP machine, yet crashes at least a couple of times a week on my Dell Mini 9 with Ubuntu 9.10 installed and kept up to date. True, the desktop XP machine has 4GB of ram while the Mini 9 is only rocking out with 2GB, but all of my "heavy" internet browsing and viewing is done on the desktop. Firefox on my Mini 9 is used primarily for Slashdot, [H]ard|Forum, Facebook, and Kongregate.

Also, of course, if the grandparent poster had bothered to investigate, Firefox experiences a LOT of crashes, and has for years. Apparently Firefox developers don't know how to debug that kind of failure. Apparently the more than $200 million has not been enough.

The randomness of failure reports suggests that Firefox writes to a random location memory that is important in some systems and not others. Definitely the way events are handled has degraded in the last few versions. Firefox often t

Isn't it the editor's job to not copy text directly from the article if it is so terrible? Come to think of it, why do we still grace these clowns with the title "editor" at all? They seem rather resitant to actual editing.

Yeah. They really are not editors. I don't really think they necessarily should be, either. They basically just post stuff, editing only occasionally. I mean a garbage man also takes in toxic chemicals to be properly disposed of twice a year, but we don't call them "Toxic waste disposer men".

Occasionally (and I'm not trying to be pedantic), I will try and use parentheses (not that it's a better solution, but it seems to break up the parenthetical expressions in a more visually pleasing manner) to keep my sentences simpler, while other times (more often than not) I'll just get straight to the point (if there indeed a point to be made).:)

Netscape Communicator (or simply "Netscape") was Internet Explorer's main (only?) competition in the late 90s. It was a web browser developed and released by Netscape which at one time was dominant, but has since been relegated to history.

There are two main reasons for its demise:

1) Microsoft finally woke up and realised that the Internet (and specifically the World Wide Web) was important, and developed IE, finally bundling it as part of Windows

2) Netscape decided to make version 5 a complete rewrite from scratch, which gave MS all the time they needed to improve IE to the point that it made Netscape look like a bad joke.

To my mind, 2) is what really killed it; Netscape 4 was buggy and slow, and while it was definitely comparable to IE4, IE5 was superior (and I say that as someone who went from Netscape 4 to Mozilla - I have never used IE as my primary browser, and most likely never will). Netscape did release versions 6 and 7, based on Gecko and the Mozilla code base, but by then it was far too late. (They also sucked compared to Mozilla/Firefox and IE).

Rewriting Firefox from scratch would be a suicidal move by Mozilla. A simpler solution is fork Chromium and port XUL to run on top of WebKit and V8. This way they get good code to base their browser on, while maintaining ownership to the (newer) code.In the meantime they can continue Gecko 1.9 development and try to bring in more of WebKit and V8 into the codebase.In ways kinda like what happened with KHTML and WebKit.

Why? V8 is slower than SpiderMonkey in a number of cases; Spidermonkey is working on addressing the cases when it's not (and vice versa, I'd hope). WebKit is significantly buggier than Gecko's layout layer in a number of cases (and vice versa in other cases, of course, but the attempt to shoehorn XUL into Webkit is unlikely to help the situation).

Porting XUL to run on top of Webkit would be a huge project distracting from other desperately-needed work.

A simpler solution is fork Chromium and port XUL to run on top of WebKit and V8.

I don't really know whether it'd be good or bad, but I'd be disappointed to see Mozilla switch to WebKit. Nothing against WebKit, but do we really want for every browser to be using the same rendering engine? Diversity in the software ecosystem is a good thing, if you ask me.

In the meantime they can continue Gecko 1.9 development and try to bring in more of WebKit and V8 into the codebase.
In ways kinda like what happened with KHTML and WebKit.

It was probably a little easier to bring improvements from WebKit into KHTML, since WebKit was based on KHTML in the first place.

Most of Firefox's slowness is XPCOM, not the renderer. Pluging WebKit in won't fix the underlying problem, which they have been trying to address, although it seems like they have one snail doing the work.

XPCOM was overused. Too many things were made into XPCOM objects (with all the massive associated overhead that goes with it) and as a result jumping between XPCOM components all the time, C to JS to C to XPConnect to actual function, on practically EVERY FUNCTION CALL, tends to make things a little slow

I said it properly, too bad education is not really doing much good to anyone anymore, people should be able to distinguish various types of subtlety based on a written sentence, but there are quite a few who are just too dense.

if you're talking about the UNIX variant, sure. When SCO was a UNIX vendor, they were fairly well respected. That's not the same SCO in anything but a name, as the one that was so controversial several years ago.

Imagine if Firefox was perfect and the web environment was stable: in other words there was no need to change it anymore until the environment changed. Would the Mozilla folks let it be? No because people are now employed by the Mozilla Foundation and jobs are at stake. Firefox is effectively a commercial product now. As happens to nearly every commercial software product that meets its users needs and original design goals, the software will come to experience feature bloat as the developers try to keep the attention of its userbase. (For the record, I think the claims that it is already bloatware are premature.) Feature bloat and change for the sake of change are the future of Firefox and it will all come in the name of "innovation".
PS In any case, the Linux version of Firefox could use some attention devs!

Unless the features included in software are unused by the vast majority of that software's users, then it is not feature bloat. Just because you personally don't need a feature, and that your personal copy would be faster without it doesn't mean it's bloated, it just means it has a feature that you don't need. Personally I find mail merge to be a completely wasted feature in every office suite I've ever used. People who send a lot of form letters on the other

Of course, it'll be a long time before Firefox is "perfect". In reality, that will never happen. Still, the same argument could be applied for sufficiently high values of "good enough".

In this sort of situation, I would hope that they'd start putting resources on other projects. Endlessly polishing Firefox to keep people employed does not make economic sense. Those developers could turn their attention to Bugzilla, or to Thunderbird, or come up with a new project. Leave a smaller number of people behin

I wonder how long before we get the next great "just the browser ma'am" again. Kind of like when we got Firefox because the last incarnation was a bloat factory. Occasionally we get new stripper models out there but none gain traction.

Hopefully it won't feel so bloated when they thread tabs properly, damn if some pages don't make me feel that Firefox locked up. There are still pages Safari or IE will display properly that Firefox won't.

Would the Mozilla folks let it be? No... Firefox is effectively a commercial product now. As happens to nearly every commercial software product that meets its users needs and original design goals, the software will come to experience feature bloat as the developers try to keep the attention of its userbase.

That has been common, but it's not universal. Take OSX as a counter-example. Apple just released 10.6, which didn't offer many new features but was more aimed at stripping out bloat, increasing efficiency, and preparing for the future. Open source software has an additional safeguard against the sort of bloat you're describing in that, if it becomes sufficiently bloated that people are unhappy, the project can be forked.

Not that you're completely wrong, since it is pretty common that software packages r

That might have something to do with the fact that MSVC++ generates 30% faster code (on the particular codebase in question) than g++ does...

Not that this is the only source of Linux performance issues (pango, I'm looking at _you_), but lack of a usable pgo mode in gcc (what it does have falls down on keeping track of its own profiling information and errors out when applied to Gecko), is a quite noticeable.

I'd assume that the preferences are there because that is where they are under most Gnome apps. They are trying to make it integrate as seamlessly as possible with the native desktop. If they moved it under Tools under Linux, you might be happy, but it would annoy me because I'm accustomed to hitting Edit for changing preferences.

FTA:That's all well and good, but it raises the question: what should Mozilla be doing *after* it conquers the browser world – that is, once it has 50% market share?

Easy, people should begin to explore other alternatives like Chrome, Safari and Opera. There should ALWAYS be choices because absolute power corrupts absolutely whether it's IE or Firefox. It's naive to make simple assertions like Microsoft = bad and Mozilla = good. Any organization that gets that kind of control eventually capitalizes on it. I know the article says "The threats have changed". How about "Mozilla's motivations will change?"

Just look at the Firefox 3.6 news where Mozilla is going to be reducing the size of the sandbox that developers get to play in. Many feel this is a good move, but there are plenty of other developers and users that are going to be left in the cold. As long as they don't impede the function of Adblock+ and NoScript then I will remain a happy Firefox user.

Any organization that gets that kind of control eventually capitalizes on it.

Worse, any organization that gets too much control will impede the progress of others.

Capitalizing on success is fine. I don't have a problem with Microsoft making money from their browser. I have a problem with IE being the de facto standard and stifling all innovations that Microsoft chooses not to implement in their browser.

And notice I'm not even talking about any misbehavior on Microsoft's part. The point is that monoculture is bad. Monoculture means no competition, which means no innovation that

What a bunch of bastards the Time Lords turned out to be eh ? The drums, the drums, the never ending drums.

Am I the only one who had tears in my eyes when the Doctor said "I don't want to go" ? I guess it's the first time I'd realised the "human side" of the character, and the loss he feels when he regenerates. And much better work from Russell T. Davies this time, the last series ending with the Daleks and Davros seemed like a Facebook conversation on steroids.

The largest challenge to openness stares us in the face every day, and nobody seems to notice: Much of our data is stored in proprietary servers controlled by private companies, including Facebook, Google, and Twitter. The Internet was consciously and carefully engineered to put the power in the hands of the end user; data was stored at the end point in open formats (think of POP/IMAP mail and USENET forums, for example). Now a new generation of less sophisticated users hands over their personal data to private companies. Not only are there serious privacy risks, but we've lost control of our data. You are dependent on Facebook's good will to migrate *your* data to another application. What happens when your cloud vendor goes out of business?

With all due respect, there's a huge difference between distribution and aggregation. Even in the "good old days" of IRC they were trying to build huge networks of servers which would be your one place to network with all your (geeky) friends. Everybody was very busy trying to avoid duplication of long-distance transfers because despite even though it looked like one Internet then doing "long distnace" was expensive for the ISPs. They'd probably be more spinning in their graves (though they're probably not

You raise _the_ fascinating question. I am intrigued by the balance between my privacy, independence and the robustness and accessibility (web apps) of the cloud framework.

I love google services, I trust Google to store my data and be there tomorrow. I trust them to be less evil than my needs demand for the services that I use. I use encryption for stuff that is sensitive and mostly (if not completely) I don't particularly care about whether they have access to my data because under the current terms of ser

Actually the article and Mozilla's spokesman address this concern as one of the primary threats to the openness of the web in the future. It is mentioned that this threat, amongst others, will hopefully be addressed by the projects pushed through drumbeat in an attempt to keep information from coalescing into a few central locations. Whether you are cynical or not, like Mozilla or not, or are new here or not, the article is, at the very least, an interesting discussion. I would recommend checking it out.

What happens when your cloud vendor goes out of business?Well it depends on how stupid you are...

Cloud computing isn't a flawed concept there are just flawed implementations of it. A lot of SaaS companies offer ways for you to download you data if you want/need it. Facebook and Twiiter are not really good examples because in reality their stuff isn't really that vital... Heck you would probably be better off if it was wiped out. Next this is something slash dotters don't seem to realize when a company of

And I forgot i wanted to say something:Unite may or may not grow to be the "next big thing" in social networking, but once the mozzilla community develop an equivalent for firefox while passing the idea as theirs, it sure will.

You know the really interesting thing about Unite? It's not even remotely novel. It was a feature of one of the very first web browsers in CERN (which also had some nice editing features, although back then you could write an editor for all of HTML in well under a hundred lines of code). The original idea of the WWW was that every client would also be a server.

The problem with Unite is that it only works when you are online. To really replace things like PutYourFaceInTheBook it needs to incorporate som

That's fits in well with the original impulses behind Mozilla and Firefox. The former was about transforming the Netscape Communincator code into an open source browser, and the latter was about defending open standards from Microsoft's attempt to lock people into Internet Explorer 6 and its proprietary approaches

I thought Firefox was about Mozilla being bloated and slow, and nothing to do with IE or Microsoft at all?

After spending several years with that nightmare called Trident [wikipedia.org], there is no way in hell Mozilla can ever produce something worse than that. I will stop talking to anyone who refuses to stop using that thing, and develop all websites to shut MS browsers out, until that thing is completely trashed, and rewritten from scratch.

And don’t dare modding me down for that, if you haven’t tried to develop a web application with a complex layout in it, or at least spent 3 years, building I

Firefox "was about defending open standards from Microsoft's attempt to lock people into Internet Explorer 6 and its proprietary approaches"? Maybe in Stallman's world.

In the words of one of Firefox's creators: (http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/009698.html)"We discussed the rot within Mozilla, which we blamed on Netscape and Mozilla's inability to assert independence. He suggested it'd be perhaps preferable to start again on the user interface, much of the code in the front end was so bloated and bad that it was better off starting from a fresh perspective.... These browser efforts were reactions to the rot we had seen in the Mozilla application suite."

Yeah, I remember Firefox before it was Firefox (as I'm sure many others do), and I don't remember such clear, specific, and grand plans regarding IE's lock in. It was more that Mozilla's suite had a relatively small but loyal following, and a good portion of that following was displeased by various problems with the suite. For one, it was slow. Rightly or wrongly, a lot of the blame fell on the idea that too much was being crammed into one app (it was a browser, email client, newgroups, HTML editor, and

Too long; didn't read. Repeating the same mission statement 3 or 4 times with minor modifications doesn't make for a terribly great article. Generally, mission statements shouldn't even be expressed the first time around.

I don't do web development or anything, but I do have 11 plugins running in Firefox as well as regularly reaching 15-20 open tabs at a time...and I've never had a memory issue since 3.5 was released (running on 4 GB of DDR2800 ram). What is it that you folks are doing that causes Firefox to have such a massive memory leak still? Are you not running the latest version? Are you trying to use it to cure cancer?

I don't mean to sound like a douche, I'm genuinely interested...I'm just curious why so many peopl

Want to give a clue as to what "Drumbeat" is, and maybe some kind of link that looks like it might explain what you're talking about? (A Computerworld article about "the threats have changed" doesn't help.)

Okay, you are using a web browser as a development tool and find it trendy to beat on it because it gets bulky when you decide to make it do stuff that it wasn't inherently designed to do.... and thats the developer's fault?

So you want a web browser that can double as the best web development tool in the planet (i do think that ff+plugins is the best dev platform for the web today), and when doing that is faster and slimmer than even browsers that can only browse (like safari)?

The memory usage is just part of the problem though, with the additional memory load comes lots of slowness. I have more than enough memory in my machines (8GB for this particular one) but when firefox is only consuming about 1GB it already gets so incredibly slow that I just restart it every couple of hours. And I don't have any exotic extensions installed, just the usual (firebug, adblock, greasemonkey, etc..)

generally you do have a point, but the mentality of just throwing more mem and cpu at inefficient programs is wasteful.
microsoft went that way with vista - just stuff everything in there, lads! people'll just buy more ram. but this backfired badly, as vista came out just before the big netbook and smaller-is-better hype.

we shouldnt need a fracking beowulf cluster of powerhouse PCs to run a browser or some other everyday app.

Firefox has been much better on memory management since FF3. Everyone talks about Chrome being lean and fast, and FF being this bloated piece of crap.

You do realize that using current builds of both, Firefox uses less memory? The UI will likely never be quite as fast due to XUL, but Firefox's memory management is pretty dang good. They could probably take a page from how Chrome handles garbage collection with their V8 Javascript engine, but that's another story.

Therein lies the problem. Memory management to me doesn't become a problem unless I run out (and I've made sure that on my desktop machines, I won't run out). What matters to me is the speed at which I can interact with my desktop.

Now, Firefox on Windows isn't that bad. Pretty snappy. Firefox on Mac isn't as good, but still OK. Firefox on Linux drags along at a speed slow enough for you to think someone is intentionally sabotaging it. I don't care how much memory it's using, but if the UI feels draggy I don't want it.

Chrome on the other hand - feels like greased lighting in comparison. It's fast and snappy across all three platforms. What's bad is that for a UI LOOK perspective I don't like Chrome. I have to use an addon to make sure new tabs always open at the end of the list, and I wish to goodness that there was a way to move the tabs below the address bar. Not to mention that downloads open at the bottom of my browser rather than in a seperate window. Still, despite those quirks, I've taken to using Chrome on everything just because of it's speed. It's also proven more stable for me. Firefox will typically slow to a crawl if you leave certain Javascript heavy pages open on it for an extended amount of time. If I leave the same ones open on Chrome it's fine when I come back the next day.

I can understand that. That's why I'd like to see more work put into the little polishings in Linux rather than constant new stuff added. My Linux desktop, from a functionality standpoint, works fine. The only thing I could ask for would be a native WoW client and an iTunes port and I swear I'd be in heaven.

What bugs me about it is the little things. Firefox for a long time was an annoyance, but Chrome has fixed that for me. However, I've noticed app crashes a little more frequently on Linux for exampl

gcc's optimizer is pretty good, actually, and the only compiler that seems to beat it is icc, and then not by much. If anything, gcc should have a more profound effect on OS X than on Linux since Apple uses an older version of the compiler (4.2) to avoid the GPLv3, while Linux distributions can use the latest and greatest.

No, it's not that hardware that is the problem. My netbook with FF under windows spanks the interative performance of FF under linux on my main laptop most of the time. 1G Atom vs 4G Core2 2.5. I'm not talking about render time necessarily, I'm referring to responsiveness when I click a button, or try to type in a field, etc.

Really? Every time I open a tab in Firefox, memory usage increases. Closing tabs does not reduce usage. After a day or two, memory usage exceeds 300 MB even with only a few tabs open on a Windows 7 system with 4 GB of RAM. I've seen this on numerous systems with Windows 7 and on Windows XP SP3. I don't think my experience is unusual.

I think Firefox is a great browser, and I don't see myself switching to Chrome because of the lack of Adblock Plus and the "Awesome Bar". The latter has made it exceedingly easy

It's been a great ride, and I thank them for what they've done. I still run it on my Work PC. (Until Google figures out how to make programs that run behind authenticated proxies).

But they've become just as complacent with their memory usage as Microsoft did with IE6 sucking. Only programs I've ever had use MORE were Photoshop when I'm doing batch processing of HDR images and VMWare when I've given the guest >1024MB of RAM, and even then, they don't beat

Well, the weirdest thing happened to me:My Firefox always behaved well. No memory problem, no bloat, no slowness.Until some weeks ago. I don’t exactly know what changed. I know I added some extensions (e.g. “Stylish”). I know there was a minor version update. I know Flash got updated (the thing I still have a feeling is the real responsible one in this). (64 bit Linux here, with 64 bit Flash too)

Now I find that the browser, after having used it a bit, and closed all tabs afterwards (yes, I